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1985/Cleveland
Ideas * DIKW * Leadership studies * Connected Education Parts Views ; Magill Book Reviews The leader, asserts Harlan Cleveland, is a generalist, a coordinator of the activities of others. Advances in technology and knowledge through the centuries have changed the qualifications for leadership from rank to achievement; now the mushrooming developments in computer and telecommunications technologies, and those results when they are used together, are transforming methods of executive leadership. It is essential that the manager understand how information technology affects the business of getting things done through others. After surveying the evolution of the leader’s role as a generalist, Cleveland discusses how information has replaced material things as the major resource that must be managed, and he goes on to discuss how attempting to manage information using techniques developed to manage things will cause trouble for leaders. His discussion focuses on the following: the control of leadership when more, not fewer, people have access to much more information than ever before; the control of access to information and control of who shall benefit from its use; how to ensure the fair distribution of information and fair access of it; and the global ramifications resulting from these developments. He then considers some of the social changes that will be necessary for a successful transition to leadership in an information-dominated world, suggesting that schooling at all levels must integrate formerly distinct branches of knowledge and emphasize global causes and effects; he suggests further that the best use to which society can put older members of the work force may well be to continue to use their accumulated wisdom. Cleveland, currently dean of the University of Minnesota’s Hubert H. Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, draws on his wide reading and his extensive experience as an administrator, both public and academic, for this book. Extensively referenced, the book is rich in anecdote and very readable. Whether one agrees with Cleveland’s suggestions and conclusions, one will thoroughly enjoy reading what he has to say. Source: Magill Book Reviews, ©2005 Salem Press, Inc.. All Rights Reserved. http://www.enotes.com/knowledge-executive-salem/knowledge-executive ; Lisa Kimball Carlson Netweaver - October, 1985 Title: BOOK REVIEW - The Knowledge Executive by Harlan Cleveland Author: Lisa Kimball Carlson THE KNOWLEDGE EXECUTIVE: Leadership in an Information Society, by Harlan Cleveland, E.P. Dutton, New York, 1985. $18.95. 260pp. Harlan Cleveland's widely read THE FUTURE EXECUTIVE (1972) has had a major influence on managers and their training programs for the past decade. This new book promises to be a keystone for the managers of the next ten years. Cleveland, who is currently Dean of the University of Minnesota's Hubert Humphrey Institute of Public Affairs, has served as Associate Secretary of State, Ambassador to NATO, and President of the University of Hawaii. He has spent years studying executives and their jobs. THE KNOWLEDGE EXECUTIVE is full of Cleveland's ideas about the implications of the information society for executive work--much of it based on his own extensive experience with technologies, including computer conferencing. He calls the marriage of computers and telecommunications the "central event of our time." Cleveland identifies several key ideas which can help us think about what the new information environment means for leadership and the executive function: 1. Information is not *like* other resources. 2. The ultimate effect of all knowledge is to organize things or people, to arrange them in ways that make them different from the way they were before. 3. There is a distinction between the information itself and the service of delivering it. He suggests that we have carried over into our thinking about *information*, concepts which were developed for the management of *things*, e.g. property, depletion, depreciation, monopoly, market economics, the class struggle, and top-down leadership. "The assumptions we have inherited are not producing satisfactory growth with acceptable equity in either the capitalist West or the socialist East," says Cleveland. The solution? Stop treating information as "just another *thing*, a commodity with pseudophysical properties, and look hard instead at what makes it so special." Some of these special qualities include: * Information is expandable--in an information society we trade glut for scarcity. The ultimate limits to growth of knowledge and wisdom are TIME and the CAPACITY of people to analyze and think integratively. * Information is compressible--it can be concentrated, integrated, summarized, and miniaturized for easier handling. As a result, the information society is not resource-hungry because production and distribution are sparing in their requirements for energy and other physical resources. * Information is substitutable--it can replace land, labor, and capital. "People who use computers hooked up to telecommunications don't need much real estate to be efficient... Any machine that can be accessed by computerized telecommunications doesn't have to be in your own inventory." * Information is transportable--there has been a major dimensional change in both the speed and volume of human activity because of this change in transportability of resources. Remoteness is now more choice than geography. * Information is diffusive--information is "aggressive, even imperialistic, in striving to break out of the unnatural bonds of secrecy in which thing- minded people try to imprison it. The straightjackets of public secrecy, intellectual property rights, and confidentiality of all kinds fit very loosely on this restless resource." * Information is shareable--*things* are exchanged but if I sell you an idea, we both have it. "The information-rich environment is thus a sharing environment. That needn't mean an environment without standards, rules, conventions, or ethical codes. It does mean the standards, rules, conventions, and codes are going to be different from those created to manage the zero-sum bargains of market economics and traditional international relations." Cleveland believes that the first task for leaders is to reassess concepts created to deal with problems of the management of *things*, e.g. scarcity, bulk, limited substitutability, expense and trouble of transportation, and ability to hoard. He points out that the characteristics of physical resources made possible hierarchies which are crumbling today--power based on control, influence based on scarcity, class based on ownership, privilege based on early access to valuable resources, and politics based on geography. "The explosive fusions of computers and telecommunications are changing the options and opportunities for the generalist leaders and especially for those who lead by getting things done--the executives," says Cleveland. "Those who learn how to achieve access to the bath of knowledge that already envelopes the world will be the future's aristocrats of achievement." http://groupjazz.com/netweaver/archive/nw85-a33.html See also * * Cites